


The Great North Road

by Cerdic519



Series: Elizabethan Serenade [1]
Category: Elizabeth (Movies), Supernatural, The Tudors (TV)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Elizabethan Era, Baby Castiel (Supernatural), Baby Dean Winchester, Destiel - Freeform, England (Country), F/M, M/M, Scotland, Stuarts, Tudors - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 10:04:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13949265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerdic519/pseuds/Cerdic519
Summary: An Elizabethan Destiel. The year is 1542, and in Stilton, England, Mary Winchester is caring for her beautiful alpha baby, Dean. Three hundred miles away in Edinburgh, Scotland, Lady Rebecca Novak has taken a break from looking after her newborn omega son, and is giving her husband Lord Charles a certain look that says Castiel will not be their youngest son for much longer.....





	The Great North Road

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MelodyofWings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MelodyofWings/gifts), [bookworm4ever81](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookworm4ever81/gifts), [lyster99](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyster99/gifts).



**MDXLII**  
**XIV July**  
**Stilton, Huntingdonshire (England)**

A gusty wind blew down Stilton's long High Street in the direction of London, nearly eighty miles away. Mary Winchester sighed as she went back into the Bell Inn to tend to her baby son. Dean was six months old now, and the most beautiful baby in existence. She often gave thanks for a healthy alpha son in these times so troubled by plague and pestilence.

It was not just health problems that threatened the lives of the people of England. The increasingly tyrannical King Henry the Eighth had earlier that year dispatched Wife Number Five to the scaffold, poor Catherine Howard finding out the hard way that gossip could be deadly to queens who were too liberal with their favours. The country had not been sorry to see her go, viewing her like her cousin Anne Boleyn as yet another attempt by the ambitious Howard family to get their greasy mitts on the reins of power.

Much worse however was the problem of religion. To marry Anne Boleyn (Wife Number Two) the king had broken with Rome and established a separate Catholic church in England of which he was head; this had enabled him to annul (1) his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The problems had arisen from what had followed, when the king had had Protestants burnt at the stake for not being Catholic, and Catholics burnt at the stake for denying his leadership of the (English Catholic) Church. What had seemed at the time a temporary break was beginning to look horribly permanent; one (wisely anonymous) wit had quipped recently that the king 'had to have his five a day' – five burnings at the stake, that was!

Mary was better informed than most of her fellow country folk as to what was going on because the Bell happened to be located on the Great North Road between London and Edinburgh, and messengers taking news to the king often changed horses and took refreshment there. The latest one had told her that to cap it all the country now looked set to be dragged into Round Seven of the Italian Wars, as King Francis I of France made yet another attempt to push into the southern lands of the Holy Roman Empire (2) under Charles V. The cherry on the cake was that Henry was allied to the Emperor but his nephew James V King of Scots (3) was allied to the French king. War with Scotland would therefore be added to the general mess.

Mary sighed again, and picked up her baby. The child's forest-green eyes shone brightly in the gloomy room, and he gurgled happy. She wondered where her useless lummocks of a husband was but for now focussed her attentions on her son.

“You are so beautiful, Dean”, she crooned over the baby alpha. “You will make someone very happy one day.”

֎†֎†֎†֎†֎

**XV December**  
 **Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh (Scotland)**

Over three hundred miles away at the far end of the Great North Road, Lord Charles Novak sat at his papers. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them. In the dangerous and often deadly world of Scots politics, the beta had managed the impressive feats of both achieving greatness _and_ staying alive, mainly because every potential rival knew that the man tried as hard as he could to avoid power. He just always ended up getting it because everyone knew that he didn't want it and was therefore not a threat.

Until a few hours ago, Lord Charles had been principal private secretary to King James V – but the dreadful news from the Border meant that that had changed. The Stuarts had never been lucky; the king's immediate four ancestors, all Jameses, had been stabbed to death in a drain, blown up by a cannon, murdered fleeing from one battle, and killed in another (the beta privately thought they might have taken the hint at some point along the line). Charles' master, already ill, had just seen his 18,000-strong army somehow contrive to get defeated by an English force of barely 3,000 and perhaps unsurprisingly had died not long after having been told the news.

What made matters so much worse, Lord Charles knew, was the succession. James's first French marriage having ended when his wife had died only months after the ceremony, he had chosen one Mary of Guise as his spouse and they had had two sons, only for both to die last year. After the disaster at Solway Moss, the king had been told that his wife had now provided him with a daughter Mary, to which he had replied glumly that the crown had come to the Stuarts by a lass and would now go with one when Mary grew up and married. (4)

If of course she made it to adulthood. James Earl of Arran, Mary's distant cousin and (worryingly in Lord Charles' eyes) next in line to the throne at this point, would doubtless be appointed as her regent and he was a slippery character. It all depended on whether he backed a continuation of the Auld Alliance with France, one that had brought Scotland nothing but trouble in Lord Charles' opinion, or favoured the betrothal of his charge to Henry VIII's six-year-old son Edward, which might bring its own problems. It all made for uncertainty, and Lord Charles did not like uncertainty. People tended to start killing each other, which was just untidy.

His wife Lady Rebecca entered the room, and he bent over his work a little more. For the last few months she had been distracted with their latest son, Castiel having been their first omega, but lately she had taken again to writing those awful stories of hers, whose sole use (her husband had long decided and never commented on) was in seeing off unwanted guests who could be offered 'a free reading'. It was amazing how many visitors suddenly remembered pressing engagements at just that moment...

“Chuckie, dearest?”

He sighed and started to put away his papers. At least That stopped her stories, and perhaps eight children would be a lucky number....

֎†֎†֎†֎†֎

Notes:  
1) Catholic monarchs could not divorce but they could get their marriages _annulled_ (declared unlawful). This was because the various royal families intermarried so much that the odds on marrying a cousin were very high, and that required a special dispensation from the Pope (cash preferred). Henry VIII had tried to get the Holy Father at the time to declare his original dispensation invalid, but unluckily Catherine of Aragon, the wife he wanted to ditch, chanced to have been the aunt of Emperor Charles V – who had had the Pope in jail when Henry had asked!  
2) A loose confederation centred on modern Germany, and including the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria, Switzerland, Czechia, western Poland, Slovenia and northern Italy, plus some areas in what is now eastern France. Northern Italy was becoming semi-detached from it at this time, which was one factor in encouraging French aggression.  
3) Not King of Scotland. The difference was because of the monarch's loose (but slowly increasing) control over outlying regions like the Highlands, the Islands, Moray and Galloway.  
4) In fact it would not – unfortunately for James' daughter, as things turned out. 


End file.
